Free Moriarty by John Gardner

sarf.”
    Billy Walker then showed intelligence by coming straight back to the Professor, who had quickly summoned another of the boys—Walter Taplin—and sent him, posthaste, to Poplar to seek out the Praetorians.
    Many men in Moriarty’s position would have worried, counting the minutes—all dragging like hours—before his old lieutenants reappeared with or without the hapless Carbonardo. But James Moriarty had trained himself to sterner stuff. He was not a man to chew his fingernails or worry himself into all manner of stews. There was nothing he could do about the situation, so he sat back, enjoyed looking at the Duchess, and thought how comparatively lucky he was. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, as the Good Book says.
    As he sat, warmed by the fire and the balloon glass of good brandy at his elbow, he thought long about times gone by, musing on his childhood back in Lower Gardiner Street in Dublin, some thirty-five or -six years previously; and before that, dimly, as if through a mist, he remembered the farm, out in County Wicklow, where he had been born. Then he thought of his mother, God rest her, Lucy Moriarty, the kind and saintly woman who was one of the best cooks ever to come out of the Emerald Isle. How did she find the time to do everything? For she also taught the piano and, oddly, he was the only son who had any talent in that direction. As he thought of his dearly lovedmother, Moriarty absently ran his right thumbnail down his cheek, from just below the eye to his jawline.
    Lucy Moriarty did not tie herself to one particular family, but hired herself out to households and organizations, having a set tariff for banquets, meals of celebration, or special occasions—
any number of guests, from three to three hundred upwards
, as her advertisement proclaimed. She had, it was known, been called to cook for royalty and for great men of the land, and many of her dishes could never be beaten by other equally talented cooks. It was said that her steak-and-kidney pie was the food of angels (the pastry being the lightest and most meltingly succulent that even truly knowledgeable palates would ever taste); that her lobster cocktail was ambrosia; and that a man would have to walk the length and breadth of Europe to enjoy the equal of her beef Wellington and horseradish.
    Lucy Moriarty’s one failing in life was her marriage. Her husband, Sean Michael Moriarty, the schoolmaster, was a man of irrational temper and a drunkard to boot. Sean Moriarty gave his wife three fine sons and precious little else. He treated his sons as though they were whipping boys to his conscience, and when he had finished leathering them he would, often as not, take his belt to his wife.
    Until she could stand it no longer.
    Moriarty could still clearly remember the night when his mother gathered up all three children and stole out of the house, leaving the cruel and unruly Moriarty asleep in his chair, deep in an alcoholic stupor. Which was how he spent most Saturday nights.
    Lucy Moriarty had managed to squirrel away a substantial nest egg from her cooking jobs, and on that fateful night she had money enough to pay the fares for herself and the three boys on the ferry from Dublin to Liverpool, where her sister Nelly lived in comparative peace with her kind and hardworking docker husband.
    Sean Moriarty never came in search of his family, and Lucy paid her parish priest for Masses of thanksgiving (never, of course, telling the priest the details or reason for her giving thanks lest Father O’Flynn counsel her to return to Sean and make good their marriage). She also said countless novenas to the Blessed Virgin, praying that Sean Moriarty would continue to be absent from hearth and home.
    The strange thing about the Moriarty family, growing up in Liverpool, was that the three boys were all blessed, or more likely cursed, with the same Christian name—an eccentricity that could be laid at the door